'Breaking Bad' costar Aaron Paul gets his first feature-film lead

Aaron Paul is gearing up for the premiere of his first-feature film lead, in the “Need for Speed,” playing a man who loves cars, and loves driving them even more.

By Ed SymkusFor The Patriot Ledger

Aaron Paul is gearing up for the premiere of his first-feature film lead, in the “Need for Speed,” playing a man who loves cars, and loves driving them even more.

He just finished his run co-starring in “Breaking Bad” as Jesse, an unpredictable meth head. Before that he had the role of Scott, an upstanding young husband in “Big Love.”

But even with his visibility and name recognition on the fast rise, he didn’t even blink during a recent publicity stop in Boston to promote the film, which opens Friday, when he was asked why he doesn’t use his real name.

“Oh, Sturtevant? Yeah, I’m Aaron Paul Sturtevant,” he said, then explained, “I tried to do Sturtevant when I first moved to L.A. I was just this young kid from Idaho, super-nervous in these meetings, and the casting directors were always saying, ‘How do you pronounce your last name?’ Then someone said, ‘Well, what’s your middle name?’ I told them Paul, and they felt that actually had a good ring to it. I’d never even thought about that, but then I did, and I figured, well, Paul it is my name as well. So I decided to go with that.”

Paul broke in doing TV commercials, then started landing guest parts on TV shows before getting that oh-so-rare lucky shot. No, it wasn’t “Breaking Bad.” It was “Big Love.”

“That was my first somewhat regular gig,” he said. “I was a recurring character for four seasons. But it was strange because a lot of people thought, ‘Wow, you’re on TV, you’re on a series, you’re making money.’ That wasn’t the case. I was getting my face known, but I was barely paying my bills. Doing ‘Big Love’ was the most stressful time in my career. I don’t want to say how much I made, but after taxes it was $600 per episode. And living in Los Angeles, my rent was twice that each month. But that show did open doors.”

The very big door known as “Breaking Bad” closed when that show finished its run last year, but Paul, who had a small part in the film “Mission: Impossible III” and a relatively large one in the remake of “The Last House on the Left,” was already wrapped up in his first feature lead, a film based loosely on the video game “Need for Speed.”

“I was a little hesitant at first,” he admitted. “I knew the game and was a fan of the game, but I didn’t know if it would necessarily translate all that well (to film). But the script showed up, and I read it, and I was just so pleasantly surprised. I thought it was such a fun story and I was invested in the characters from the very beginning.”

He plays Tobey, a street racer and mechanic who’s framed for a crime he didn’t commit, and, after his release from prison, decides to exact an interesting sort of revenge. Paul liked the plot but was really attracted to the racing aspect.

“They let the racing sequences breathe,” he said of what he read in the script. “I could tell on the page that they wanted to have these races be raw and gritty, and the pitch to me was we want to do a throwback to the ’70s films like ‘Vanishing Point’ and ‘Smokey and the Bandit,’ the films that kind of started that genre. And they wanted to do all the stunts practical, no CGI. Just like those films back then, when they didn’t have CGI. So I knew it would have a different feel and look to it. That’s why I did it.”

Paul found out, after the fact, that DreamWorks, the company producing the film, was initially interested in him for the heel, not the hero.

“They were looking at me to play Dino, which turned out to be Dominic Cooper’s role,” he said. “But it was Steven Spielberg, who is a principal partner in DreamWorks, who said, ‘Why are you guys thinking of Aaron for Dino? Why not consider him for the lead?’ And when the casting directors later did approach me to play the lead, I knew they were making something a little different.

“I don’t see myself as the token leading-man kind of guy in this sort of film, but that said, after doing it, Tobey is just a different sort of guy. I remember being at a DreamWorks meeting, and Spielberg just kind of walked in the door and sat in on it for about 30 minutes. He was very excited that I was doing the project, and he was the reason why I got the part. He also gave me some advice. He said, ‘Listen, (director) Scott Waugh is gonna want you to do a lot of the driving, so do what you’re comfortable with. But if you don’t feel comfortable during a certain day or shot and you don’t want to do it, just call in the stuntmen. That’s why they’re there.”

Paul laughed, and added, “That was very good advice.”

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